Are You Blogging or Journaling?

This post is for my readers who aren’t uber-early adopters on the bleeding edge of tech. Many of you will want to just bypass this one. Every now and then, I write something for those only moderately obsessed with technology and social media.

If you’re thinking of starting a blog, one of the first things you need to think about is whether you want a blog or whether you actually want an online journal…or something else entirely. You also need to give careful thought to how public or private that site should be, which depends on the content you plan to write. Although nearly all sites offer a way to make them “private,” sites like LiveJournal and Vox cater to those who journal as opposed to blog. What’s the difference? Some would argue that there’s none – the words are interchangeable – but I would disagree.

Journaling is the recording of your thoughts, activities, and the other minutiae of your everyday life and publishing it to the web. In a style similar to the “dear diary” format, journalers, (lets not call them “journalists,” too confusing!) chronicle their daily lives in an open fashion, and have communities of friends that do the same. Of course, anyone’s blog can have personal entries from time to time, but the difference between a journaler and a blogger is that the entire content of a journaler’s site is personal content. The most notable community of journalers are the “mommy bloggers.” I have to admit I don’t follow these sites, but the starter pack at moms.alltop.com can give you an idea of who’s hot in this space. One of the most memorable sites from this genre is dooce.com whose author, Heather Armstrong, ended up adding a phrase to the blogger lexicon: “dooced,” a reference to when she got fired from her job for blogging. Although that happens less often these days, it’s still good to think about the kind of content you plan to write before choosing your blogging platform. The more personal the info, the more likely you are to want a platform that offers some form of privacy control.

Journalers vs. Bloggers

Journalers love to share their full lives online. Instead of reporting news, commenting on trends, sharing informative tips, or arguing about politics, etc., a typical journaler’s post will often be a recount of some event that just took place or random thought that just popped into their head. Some of the journalers’ sites, yes, mommy bloggers included, are well-written, humorous, and insightful. They offer the refreshing commentary that many newspaper columnists used to provide – before we stopped getting the paper, that is.

On the other hand, bloggers, especially the ones hanging around these days, tend to be more like citizen journalists than anything else. Few have traditional journalism training, but they still report the news nonetheless. The difference is that bloggers tend to offer opinions alongside the facts. And the facts themselves aren’t checked as rigorously as a “real” reporter would check them. In the blogging world, the audience of blog readers does the fact-checking and posts their findings in the comments. Good bloggers will then go back to update the post (usually with strikethough) to notate the corrections. Great bloggers rarely have to do this…but it’s nothing to be ashamed of when it happens – it’s just part of the process.

Other types of web writers include everything from fan fic/short story writers to personal diaryists, who use the web as a place to post their “dear diary”-esque thoughts, but keep everyone but themselves (or themselves and few close friends) shut out from reading their thoughts. Journalers tend to be more public than diaryists, if you really want to split hairs. Sites like the above-mentioned Vox and LJ cater more to these two types of bloggers. Diary.com is a new site that caters more to diaryists.

If you’re just starting a blog or, as an experienced blogger yourself, have offered to set up a site for a friend, you should really think about what that blog is going to be used for. As tech bloggers, we tend to think: WordPress! It’s the best! But the fact is that someone who just wants to chronicle their thoughts – and isn’t all that tech-savvy – may not think WordPress is as great as you do. That’s why when my sister asked for a recommendation for a blogging platform which she could use to blog her thoughts, videos, and photos for her 2-year Peace Corps volunteer effort, I recommended Vox. It’s not about what I like – it’s about what worked for her, keeping in mind her tech skill set and her need for ease of use.

In the end, no matter what type of blogger you are – a citizen journalist, a new media journalist (oh perhaps that’s a later post!), a journaler, or a diaryist, all that matters is that you keep posting and have fun.